Congratulations to James McGowan, who has claimed victory in the UK Puzzle Championship completing 20 of the 27 puzzles successfully achieving a score of 588 points. James has earned his qualification for the UK Puzzle team at the World Puzzle Championships to be held later in the year in Bangalore in India alongside runner-up Adam Bissett who narrowly pipped Tom Collyer into third place by a single point.
1 James McGowan 588 pts
2 Adam Bissett 403 pts
3 Tom Collyer 402 pts

The championship was also open to international participation, and attracted strong competition from around the globe. Nobody quite managed to solve all 27 puzzles within the two hours and the top five places all went to Japanese competitors with Hideaki Jo only missing out on the clouds puzzle and scoring 678 points and Endo Ken following closely behind in 2nd place missing out on the Ouroburos puzzle. Congratulations to both.

I'm delighted to see quite so many different UK solvers taking part; off the top of my head I think 29 is a considerable leap forward from a previous best of 25. Curious to know why the time limit was only two hours rather than two and a half; I suspect solvers could well have been kept busy for another half-hour.

dickoon wrote:I'm delighted to see quite so many different UK solvers taking part; off the top of my head I think 29 is a considerable leap forward from a previous best of 25. Curious to know why the time limit was only two hours rather than two and a half; I suspect solvers could well have been kept busy for another half-hour.

Hi Chris, time limit was reduced as a result of the times that came in from the test solvers - I know that their times don't take into account the formulation of answer keys but I was sure that there were going to be a number of finishers in the two hours.

You are correct about the previous UK number of 25 and definitely great to see a number of new names in there. I do hope that this is only the beginning for them all and look forward to seeing them all take part next year (and at the Open).

Thanks everyone, and congratulations to Adam for a great result.
And thanks to Liane and the 4 authors for an enjoyable and tough contest.
I can't help thinking there is a name missing from the UK list, maybe I missed an earlier comment...

Yes - thanks to everyone who was involved. I really enjoyed it. I'm not a harcore puzzler - occasionally I'll try to complete a sudoku in a paper (and usually fail!) and you'll only ever see me once a year for this competition, but I really do thoroughly enjoy taking the chance to block everything else out and think hard for two hours. I live in awe of the people at the top of the leaderboards. How they manage to finish 20+ puzzles in just a couple of hours is beyond me!

Hi Ken, I'm really glad that you enjoyed it. You'll have to come along and take part at the UKPA Open event - I'm sure that you'd really enjoy it - we have a range of people taking part from those close to the top of the leader board throughout the ranks and I'm sure that you'd pick up some top tips from everyone.